|
|
|
|
|
|
Whiskey Chaser
by Lucy Score
Raised by her three overbearing brothers, Scarlett is a hell-raising tomboy with a tool belt. A tornado stirring up trouble everywhere she goes. Her favorite pastimes? Drinking any man under the table and two-stepping. But she has zero interest in love. Scarlett's only being neighborly when she claims her sexy next-door neighbor as her new pet project. Devlin is a man at rock bottom. Marriage, political career, five-year plan to Washington, D.C. All destroyed with one well-placed jab. The golden boy is now the black sheep relegated to Bootleg Springs, a tiny West Virginia town with two claims to fame: 1. Moonshine and 2. The cold case disappearance of a teen girl. Devlin just wants to lick his wounds. But Scarlett has other ideas for his tongue ... and the rest of him. She's determined to bring him back to life, even if getting him back on his feet means never seeing him again. But when an old mystery becomes new news, she'll need his help to survive the scandal--
|
|
|
|
Hollow Bones
by Jodi Picoult
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name comes a riveting novel about the risks we take to protect the ones we love in a world where crisis is always just around the corner. On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn't have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters. Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse--a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis--have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew. Moving between past and present, Hollow Bones is an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves as we write the narratives of our lives, the plans we design to protect ourselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.
|
|
|
|
Galinda (Deluxe Limited Edition): A Charmed Childhood
by Gregory Maguire
In this sister volume to Elphie, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wicked Gregory Maguire shares the eagerly awaited origin story of Galinda, the pink-clad, effervescent, and popular favorite character.A deluxe limited edition hardcover featuring stenciled edges, designed endpapers, and more--is available for a limited time while supplies last Who was Glinda the Good Witch before she floated down in her bubble to greet Dorothy? Who was Glinda before she became Elphaba Thropp's magnetic and popular roommate at Shiz University?Well, before then, she was Galinda. With a ga.The youngest of four children in a high-born family down on their luck, Galinda is both pampered and ignored. Her natural grace promises to elevate her in the district dance competitions--but these efforts distract her from seeing the growing resentments of local merchants who disapprove of her family's business strategies. Enmired in the self-satisfactions and unnamed timidities of childhood, Galinda finds in herself neither canniness nor the need to cultivate it. However, as her father deftly pivots around the snares and nets laid for him by his competitors, Galinda begins to dance toward a life that might lift her above her proud, if hardscrabble, childhood.Galinda reveals the girl behind the bubbly, shallow clich --offering fans of Wicked their first richer glimpse into the life of a beloved and iconic character.
|
|
|
|
Life Out of Order (Deluxe Limited Edition)
by Audrey Niffenegger
GRACEFUL, COMPLICATED, SATISFYING. -BONNIE GARMUS, AUTHOR OF LESSONS IN CHEMISTRYThe multi-million copy bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife returns with an exhilarating speculative story set in a dystopian future where virtual reality and real life converge.Alba DeTamble has never lived a life in order. Born with the same rare Chrono-Displacement Disorder as her father Henry, she slips unpredictably through decades, haunted by the secrets of a future she can witness but cannot change. As Alba strives to maintain a normal life with Zach, her safe, supportive anchor, she forms a tight-knit community of artists and activists who fight to take care of each other in an increasingly unstable world. At once intimate and expansive, Life Out of Order plunges readers into a world of Niffenegger's dazzling imagination: from the riot-torn streets of a dystopian Chicago, to a digital museum for forgotten memories and lost artifacts. Curating this ever-expanding museum is Isadora, Alba's mysterious stepsister and an unsettling presence in their family - whose fate may be intertwined with Alba's in more dangerous ways than she knows.Told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, the story moves through a boundless, unfolding universe of virtual reality, skimming the wildest reaches of technology and our natural world. The result is a testament to the power of art and community to sustain us in these fractured times--and an epic tale that's set to define an entirely new genre in a way only Niffenegger can.
|
|
|
|
Miss Wolcott's Ghost
by Louise Penny
Armand Gamache returns There's a body in Lost Nation. Where? demands Armand as he scribbles on the pad by his bed. But the line goes dead before Chief Inspector Gamache can question the caller. The head of homicide for the S ret du Qu bec has no idea where Lost Nation is, or who woke him in the small hours of the morning at his home in Three Pines. What he does know is that the man was terrified. And so Armand is thrust out of a deep sleep and into the surrounding forests in search of the mythical Lost Nation. And a body. When he and his team of Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste find both, the situation only grows more bizarre. The unidentified dead man appears to be from an era more than a century old. He's lying in a long-abandoned cemetery, on top of a grave with a date, but no name. Adding to the mystery, the early morning call appears to have come from Gamache's friend and neighbor, Clara Morrow. While she denies any knowledge of it, it becomes clear there is some connection between her, the Morrow family, and Lost Nation. Soon, Gamache and his team are faced with tracking down not just the legend of Lost Nation, but a lost ship, lost documents belong to an eccentric Victorian botanist, and a mysterious plant not seen in a century, that might save, or take, countless lives. As the murder investigation deepens, nightmarish spectres from the past begin to haunt the S ret officers, only heightened by the appearance of one of Gamache's former and now disgraced proteges, with whom he must form an uneasy alliance. As the ghosts begin to gather, Gamache, Beauvoir, and Lacoste, with the help of Reine-Marie, Clara, and the other villagers of Three Pines, realize that the body on the grave is far from the only death. To solve the crime and avert catastrophe they must look to rancid secrets and old lies no longer dead and buried.
|
|
|
|
Chain Reaction: A Reacher Novel
by Lee Child
The heart-pounding new Jack Reacher thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child. Jack Reacher is hard to find. It's not easy to track him down. And he likes it that way. But General Susan Turner, based deep inside the Pentagon, has the means and the motive. She needs his help. A member of her team has been brutally murdered on covert duty. She can't trust anyone she works with, not even her deputy. She needs someone from the outside. Someone who solves problems and disappears without a trace. Reacher heads to Summertown, Colorado. A town as remote and bizarre as it gets. One diner, one motel, five massive data centers, two giant solar farms humming away in the dust. Total population: four people. And one of them is watching him. But Reacher isn't built to run. He's built to finish things. General Turner knows that if they come for Reacher, they'll regret it--all the way to the top of the chain.
|
|
|
|
The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse
by Heather Morris
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz returns with a masterful new novel that captures the astonishing bravery of ordinary people in extraordinary times.In 1942, the Nazis come for a Jewish family living in the Montparnasse area of occupied Paris. In the chaos of their arrest, eleven-year-old Josephine runs to the only person she can trust: her piano teacher, Andr e Levallois, a secret French Resistance operative.Andr e takes her in as a member of the family, spreading their rations and risking everything to keep her safe. But soon the authorities close in, and both Andr e and Josie are caught in a desperate race to stay alive.Epic in scope and based on real people and historical events, Heather Morris has written a story of breathtaking beauty, at once gripping, heartbreaking, and uplifting.
|
|
|
|
How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time
by Sarah Longwell
The instant #1 national Indie, Audible, and LA Times bestseller The playbook for consigning MAGA-style politics to the ash heap of history (where it belongs). Featuring a foreword by Jonathan V. Last.After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Sarah Longwell did what she's done nearly every week for the past eight years: She sat down with voters. She conducted hundreds of focus groups, listening to thousands of ordinary Americans--Republicans, Democrats, and the politically homeless--with the goal of understanding politics through the eyes of the people who will decide our country's future. American voters, and what they want for their country, are at the heart of How to Eat an Elephant. Longwell, the founder of The Bulwark and one of the sharpest political communicators of her generation, lays out the playbook for building a coalition big enough, bold enough, and tough enough to defeat authoritarian populism for good. Not with a single election. Not by doing another poll or debating the benefits of being more progressive or more moderate, but by building something new: A modern pro-democracy movement that can create its own communications infrastructure--just like the right has done for decades--achieve narrative dominance, elevate more compelling leaders, and talk to voters like adults. Drawing on her own unlikely political journey from a lesbian Republican operative to the vanguard of the anti-MAGA movement, Longwell delivers a book that is equal parts war manual and pep talk--with her personal and professional story woven throughout. With her trademark bluntness and humor, she explains exactly how we got here and, more importantly, what we must build next--all while directly quoting the most important but overlooked people in the country: the voters themselves. She answers the question: How do you eat an elephant? One voter at a time.
|
|
|
|
The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished from History
by Sam Kean
Discover the astonishing story of the world's greatest lost treasures in this enthralling narrative by a writer with the anecdotal flourishes of Oliver Sacks and the populist accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell. (Entertainment Weekly) Spanning a million years of history, the mysteries in these pages include fabled relics, legendary cities, mythical species, and undeciphered languages that have bedeviled seekers for centuries. Perhaps the single most common theme across all of history is loss. The loss of lands, loss of sacred objects, loss of languages, of rights, of life--the past groans with disappearances of all kinds. This enthralling narrative collects the most spellbinding tales of these experiences and weaves them into a thoughtful meditation on what it all means across the sweep of human history and the scope of human lives, including: The long-lost city of TroyThe hidden tomb of Genghis KhanThe destruction of the fabled library of AlexandriaThe near-destruction of the Mona Lisa and other artThe decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphsThe extinction--and potential resurrection--of dodos, mammoths, and other iconic speciesProvocative, surprising, and above all entertaining, this globe-trotting narrative acknowledges the sheer scale of humanity's losses, celebrates the treasures we have managed to retain, and reveals why they continue to captivate us centuries later.
|
|
|
|
The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic
by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell's most urgent book yet: a provocative investigation of America's epidemic of gun violence. The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why? In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American peculiarity--how the world's wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world's poorest countries. Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy? In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it.
|
|
|
|
Actually, Nevermind: Essays
by Taylor Tomlinson
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Excerpted in The New Yorker - Featured on The Today Show, The Drew Barrymore Show, The New York Times Modern Love Podcast, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and more Very funny, but it packs a real punch. It takes a lot of balls to write a book this honest. --Josh Silver, New York Times bestselling author of Fruit Fly One of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars of comedy (Jason Zinoman, The New York Times) Taylor Tomlinson explores all the things she's changed her mind about, from the serious to the absurd, in her hilarious, heartfelt, and brilliant debut. As she approaches thirty-four--the same age her mother, Angela, was at her death--Tomlinson grapples with fear and ambition, identity and doubt, and all the ways her mind has changed since the day her mom died. In these sharply observed, uproariously funny, and moving original essays, Tomlinson leads readers through a tour of her brain and her shifting opinions about everything from love and relationships, mental health and therapy, religion and sex, food and body image, being the eldest daughter and the only woman in late-night TV, to ghosts, morning people, and more. With the same unflinching honesty that fuels her beloved stand-up specials, she captures the dizzying contradictions of adulthood in the modern world: wanting independence while craving reassurance, chasing self-improvement while resisting change, and finally learning that certainty can be overrated. True wisdom, writes Tomlinson, is accepting how little you know, and real maturity is becoming as flexible as possible. (Emotionally, not physically. Real maturity also means needing to stretch way more). A fearless (NPR) comedian who makes even the heaviest subjects seem spikily funny (Jason Zinoman, The New York Times), Tomlinson now brings her natural storytelling gifts and incisive wit to the page in Actually, Nevermind.
|
|
|
|
Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves, and Art of Whitney Houston
by Emily Lordi
A top-notch biography of a generational talent. - Kirkus Reviews (starred)Dynamic.... Lordi zooms out to interrogate why the singer was seen less as a self-determined artist with her own vision than a 'Black Barbie.'... Holding Lightning works eloquently to elevate and re-reframe. - The New York Times Book ReviewA showstopping portrait of Whitney Houston as we've never seen her before--a woman in her full power, a musician who knew the impact of her gift, and a fulcrum of Black celebrity--in this first major biography of the artist who became an icon.We remember Whitney Houston for her soaring voice on songs that defined a generation and kicked open the door to Black women in pop music. Her trademark stance was a picture of elegance and power: head thrown back, arms flung straight out. Then there was her sound. One producer recalled Whitney's otherworldly ability to hold notes, comparing it to holding lightning in your hand, holding lightning in your throat. She tried to hold the lightning as she bathed us all in the glow.But since her death in 2012, the woman known as The Voice has been reduced to just that. Whitney's critics have slotted her memory into a tired genre of famous doomed women whose success owed more to their labels and their producers than to any agency of their own. Yet a closer look reveals a serious artist and woman of conviction striving to be who she was. She said it best: There would be no 'Whitney Houston' without Whitney Houston.In Holding Lightning, leading cultural critic and professor Emily Lordi has gained unique access to Houston's innermost circle to show us the Whitney we've been unwilling to see--her fluid sexuality, her unapologetic love of her own talent, her insistence that she be the architect of her own career. And, crucially, Lordi positions Houston's pivotal life in the long history of Black celebrity. Before rooting for everybody Black became the norm, Whitney worked as a relentless advocate for Black female talent across the entertainment industry.Now, finally, in Holding Lightning, we have the essential, up-close portrait of the icon we thought we knew.
|
|
|
|
Swan Song: Diana, My Sister
by Charles Spencer
Beautiful. Beloved. Hunted. The extraordinary life and death of Diana, as told by her brother, Charles. A brotherly tribute to the People's Princess, no holds barred . . . Full of love and vengeance. --The New York Times Charles Spencer was there for all this history, indelibly present in one of the most iconic tableaux of the late 20th century . . . After holding back for so long, his memoir finally tells us what it was like. --Tina Brown, Fresh Hell Substack In September 1997, Charles Spencer stood in Westminster Abbey before a watching world and shared his grief at losing his beloved sister, Diana. Now, nearly thirty years later, he tells the astonishing story of his life with Diana and the tragic week of her death. In childhood, Charles and Diana, the youngest Spencers, were inseparable - secretly calling one another Duch and Carlos. As each other's closest confidantes, they roamed the family estate, endured extremely challenging boarding schools, survived terrifying nannies, and helped each other through the agony of their parents' divorce. Yet everything changed when Diana married the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and overnight became a global icon. Charles saw his older sister serve the world's marginalized and relish being mother to her treasured sons. But, pursued by a barbaric press as her royal marriage crumbled, she was left desperately alone. Charles always tried to be there for Diana - until that black night in August, 1997. In Swan Song, Charles Spencer provides the most intimate, loving, and honest portrait yet of his sister.
|
|
|
Byron Public Library District
100 S. Washington St.
Byron, Illinois 61010
(815) 234-5107byronlibrary.org |
|
|
|